Hello everybody!! Happy new year. clinicallibrarian.wordpress.com is the blog I’ve had the longest and so I have decided to merge my writing for my CPD and other activities to that blog, as well as write about EBM tools and other items of interest in a more regular fashion. I just read a post from Krafty proposing a plan for guest bloggers to post to her blog while she undertakes MLA presidential duties and I put my hand up for it, which led to this very new decision about my own blogs. I have too many blogs now and as a result, write less. Time for a change!

2015 will be a busy year conference-wise and education-wise. I plan to attend 3 conferences: MLA15 in Austin TX USA in May, and EAHIL (Edinburgh UK) and HTAi2015 (Oslo, Norway) in June. EAHIL is a week before HTAi so I thought, why not do both! There will be plenty of education events too, including a Teaching EBM course in Oxford (tentative at this moment as I just emailed an expression of interest yesterday).

Work will be busy also, with new education sessions being planned and a possible new rounding schedule.

Very plausible argument why FaceBook is in fact, not free. FB very seductively encourages you to work for them for nothing, while they get paid by advertisers for their product – you. Food for thought!

In their now classic study of traditional media, Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky explain the basic business model of newspapers as being the production of an audience for advertising. Their analysis suggests the counter-intuitive notion that publishers’ main product is not the newspaper, which they sell to their readers, but the production of an audience of readers, which they sell to advertisers. In short, the readership is…

Communication is the topic du jour. And it has been for a little while too. I’m reading old posts from Laika’s MedLibLog and it was this post from 2008 about an article in NEJM called Etiquette-Based Medicine that got me thinking. The author, Dr Michael Khan, wrote that patients don’t complain about clinicians not being empathic or not understanding them, they complain about clinicians not looking at them, not smiling or not introducing themselves. As a patient, I haven’t had the bad luck to be stuck with a clincian who stared at a computer screen throughout my visit (yet…), but I imagine with would be annoying and probably disconcerting for many people. So many people seem to be more and more addicted to looking at computer screens than communicating with others in real life. How often do you bump into someone who is walking with their head down focusing on their screen? And worse yet, not even apologise? Last week I went to Stephen K Amos’ gig at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and one of the things he commented about was communication – “talk to people!” This was in context of being sent a break-up text via mobile phone. Then he merged that into talking to young people about sex. Lots of young people in the audience and young adults he talked to before his performances revealed that their parents weren’t giving them the ‘facts of life’ talk. Amos didn’t have one either from his parents (I did and I bet he is younger than me). Even though it may be awkward and/or embaressing, talk to people! Leave the screens and communciate in real life. It is how we have relationships.